The whole post was dripping in the kind of ignorance that can only come from loving something too much to understand how anyone could not love it. The author was clearly drowning in the feeling we all have sometimes when we can't get other people to appreciate a hobby or a book or a movie that is dear to us.
Originally I had thought to reply to him, and explain why I, as someone who has spent a fair bit of time LARPing but has no love for it, saw his ideas as a little naive, and perhaps perhaps suggest some better ones. But the discussion surrounding the post was a very positive one, and I thought my comments would be out of place, so I decided to write a blog post instead.
Then I had intended to just write a post about what I thought the LARPing community could change to draw in a far greater number of people. But even though it had been my intention to completely avoid discussing the huge open wounds that I still have twenty years later, I couldn't. Before long the post was far less a post of potentially helpful advice to people still participating in a hobby I left long ago, and much more a seething pile of hatred.
I honestly had no idea that I was still so angry about it. I had buried those feeling so deep for so long that I really thought I could talk about LARPing for a thousand words without mentioning them, but I couldn't. This post isn't about the ideas I tried to voice a month ago, its about the pain I couldn't restrain, and where it came from; maybe by writing about it, I can find some relief.
When I was in high school I was the founder and president of the school's role playing games club. Early in my last year of high school one of the members of said club, Eric Finley, talked a group of us into going to a LARPing event.
I did not have fun at said event, but I felt like I should have. The event was a fantasy themed event (as all the events run by the Live Role Playing Society were at that time) and I loved fantasy. The rules system was well designed and I love well designed rules. And yet I did not leave satisfied.
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| I can't get no . . . satisfaction |
For the next three years I went to every event put on by the LRPS, and I left every event with that same feeling that I should have had fun, but didn't. Finally, I decided to take matters into my own hands, and become an event organizer; I figured that if things were done just a little differently I could have a better time. The event I organized was a complete failure at everything I had wanted it to be; rather than being a radically different event that showed what LARPing should be, it was at best mediocre. This was very disheartening.
Still, it was the first event I could ever walk away from saying that I had fun. Which was disheartening in its own way, because I knew it would be somewhere between years later and never before I would be allowed to organize again. And while being a referee at every event probably would have been enough to keep me going, I knew I was unlikely to be a ref again for a long time.
But as down as I was about all this, I was fully expecting to keep going to events; by this time my whole life revolved around the LRPS. I had no friends that weren't part it. Even when I was taking part in my other hobbies, or just going out drinking, I only did so in the company of LRPS friends and had long ago lost contact with any friends that had no interest in live role playing.
The first domino to fall in my eventual departure from LRPS was when I was expelled from the University of Alberta. I was raised to believe that if you didn't have a university degree then you were a worthless human being. My expulsion from the U of A was and is the greatest shame of my life. I came to hate going on campus because of all the horrid feelings it brought forth. This made it difficult to participate in LRPS in the way I had been because all of the official (as well as many unofficial) meetings were held at the U of A.
The next thing to happen was that I had a falling out with two of my friends, both of whom were active LRPS members; in both cases because they owed me money which they did not pay. Rob had bought a computer off me a year earlier, when it was nearly new, and after a year of not paying the money he had promised returned it decidedly used (plus a year older). Tony had asked to borrowed money from me to fix his car, supposedly to be paid back before the end of the week, but never repaid it.
The final thing, the straw that broke the camel's back, was when I was accused of stealing from LRPS. The guy who did the accusing, Bryant, was a known ass. Him making the completely unfounded accusation, while infuriating, is something I could have lived with. No, what I could not accept was that a baseless accusation was leveled at me (his grounds for suspecting me of stealing were that he thought it was suspicious that I didn't ask LRPS for a loan as most organizers did), and no one stood up for me. Instead it was decided that I needed to prove my innocence. I provided proof of my innocence, and then never again had anything to do with LRPS.
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| I also ditched that awful haircut. |
I knew from the moment I decided to leave that I would be effectively ending every friendship I had. Oh sure, I was still on good terms with most of the members of LRPS, but by removing myself from regular contact with them, I ensured that in time all of those friendships would die. And they did die, some died the day I left, others a few months later, while three of them lasted a few years after my departure.
The last friend I had from LRPS was Todd, who had also been my roommate in university. My most vivid memory of the pain I lived with in the late 90s was when I went to visit Todd shortly after I got out from hospital from a failed suicide attempt. Since I had never told anyone why I had left LRPS, nor was I telling anyone about my suicide attempt, Todd gleefully told me about the incredible time he and others had at the wedding of Laura and James.
It was painful hearing about that wedding. I gave up more than I could ever have imagined when I left LRPS. Many of the friends I had back then, are still very good friends with each other; I have no such continuity with my past. During the years I was in LRPS I made some real progress towards being less of an introvert than I had been in my childhood, but leaving snapped me back and I have ever since been even more quiet than I was as a child. And I have never been able to think as clearly nor focus as well since the aforementioned suicide attempt.
And that is why, for me at least, "LARPing sucks monkey balls".
Thank you for writing this, Sean.
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